TY - JOUR
AU - Lang,Kevin
AU - Siniver,Erez
TI - The Return to English in a Non-English Speaking Country: Russian Immigrants and Native Israelis in Israel
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 12464
PY - 2006
Y2 - August 2006
DO - 10.3386/w12464
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12464
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12464.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Kevin Lang
Department of Economics
Boston University
270 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215
Tel: 617/353-5694
Fax: 617/353-4001
E-Mail: lang@bu.edu
Erez Siniver
The College of Management Academic Studies
7 Rabin Boulevard
Rishon LeZion 75190, Israel
E-Mail: sinivr@colman.ac.il
AB - We use a unique sample of Russian immigrants and natives in Israel to examine the return to English knowledge. In cross-section estimates there is a significant return to English knowledge for both immigrants and natives with high levels of education. Language acquisition is an important element in immigrant/native earnings convergence, but most of this convergence is explained by factors other than language acquisition. These results are confirmed using panel data on wages and knowledge of Hebrew and English over time. The benefits of English knowledge vary across occupations in ways that are largely consistent with past evidence on language-skill complementarity. Natives and immigrants with high levels of education benefit similarly from knowing English. While immigrants with low levels of education do not benefit from knowledge of English, there is some evidence that native Israelis do. Conditional on occupation, the rate at which immigrants learn English and Hebrew are largely orthogonal. Therefore earlier work on the importance of knowledge of the host-country language (Hebrew) does not appear to be significantly biased by the absence of measures of English knowledge.
ER -